Merging into the New Economics and Trade Wave Geared Up by the Mainland

 Merging into the New Economics and Trade Wave Geared Up by the Mainland

China Times (Taipei, Taiwan)

November 18, 2017

Translation of an Excerpt

U.S. President Trump’s Asia tour has drawn to a close; the world has not only seen the temperature of the North Korea nuclear dispute fall, tensions in the East China Sea and the South China Sea regions have also abated, and China-South Korea and China-Japan relations have warmed up. The Mainland proposed a new vision for economic and trade cooperation at the APEC summit, showing that it is hopeful that the East Asia economic community may be realized. When facing the great trends of the rise of China, regional integration and the Asia-Pacific area becoming a regional entity, Taiwan should seek a new self-identity.

After China proposed a Chinese-style global economic governance at Hangzhou’s G20 Summit last year, and then at the 19th National People’s Congress hoisted high the banner of erecting a community of shared destiny for global development, the atmospherics of the China threat theory have greatly dissipated. The earlier international commentators bound by bigotry have begun to objectively view the rise of China, well-known internationally publications, including America’s Time magazine and Germany’s Der Spiegel, used Chinese or Chinese pinyin on their covers, exploring in an in-depth manner the impact of China's rise, even further presenting an assessment that China would win, bringing rays of dawn to the mutual complementarity and mutual learning of Eastern and Western civilizations.

Xi Jinping forcibly proposed a Asia-Pacific free trade zone at the APEC Summit, proclaiming that in the next 15 years, China's outbound foreign investments would reach 2 trillion U.S. dollars, while receiving 2 trillion U.S. dollars in external direct investment, and importing merchandise worth 24 trillion U.S. dollars, hoping that Mainland China would shift from the world’s factory to a world market, even becoming the world’s lead sheep in e-commerce and financial services.

Facing the new wave and new opportunities of crucial East Asian economic and trade cooperation, Taiwan cannot, and should not, be excluded; in the fields of semiconductors, finance, insurance, biomedicine and services, Taiwan has the capacity to mutually complement and mutually benefit the Mainland. Cross-Strait relations are not only important for our foreign affairs, they are also important for our economics and trade. The DPP's Mainland policy must abandon its confrontational thinking and use a positive attitude to resolve cross-Strait divergences. Only by smoothening out cross-Strait relations can Taiwan successfully join the regional economic cooperation organizations and share to a maximum degree the dividends of China’s rise.

Attachment : none